I saw over on Jeff De Cagna’s site that the Air Conditioning Contractors of America have launched a weblog for their organization.
Author Archives: David
Content Management Interview Questions
Below are a set of interview questions that we used when filling the Director of Content Management position in our office. I posted these to an ASAE list today in response to a question and thought I might as well throw them up here.
These are tailored for the mission and organizational culture at our office but might be useful for those of you who interview people for content management jobs, especially those positions that manage other staff and teams.
OPENING QUESTION
1. Why are you interested in applying for this position?
QUESTIONS
2. Please describe your view of the relationships between information architecture, graphic/html design, and content development. What challenges do you see in managing the roles and responsibilities within a team responsible for these areas?
3. What are some unique qualities about publishing health care information on the web as opposed to other types of content?
4. Please describe your style of leadership in the work you have done as a staff supervisor or team leader. How has your style of leadership contributed to the success of your projects?
5. Describe a situation where you facilitated a project that spanned across several departments or functions. What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
6. What are the unique qualities of publishing to the web compared to traditional print or broadcast media? How does the management of web activities compare to the others?
7. How have you positively impacted the careers of staff you have mentored or supervised? Please cite a specific example.
8. Describe the process of redesigning a website. Please give an example from your past work if you can.
9. How do you explain what works online and what doesn’t when you are working with someone who is not as experienced as you are with html and the Web?
10. Give us an example of an occasion when you found yourself with competing priorities – more to do than you could possibly get done. What did you do to resolve the situation? Would you do anything different now?
The Quality of Your Indexers Matters
Came across these 12-year old stats recently:
Bad news I think…
1. If two groups of people construct thesauri in a particular subject area, the overlap of index terms will only be 60%.
2. Two indexers using the same thesaurus on the same document use common index terms in only 30% of cases.
3. The output from two experienced database searchers has only 40% overlap.
4. Experts’ judgements of relevance concur in only 60% of cases.
[Source: JAA Sillince, 1992, Literature searching with unclear objectives: a new approach using argumentation. On-line Review, 16 (6), 391-409]
I think that just goes to show that the quality and knowledge of your indexers (human or otherwise) is incredibly important.
The Day the Webmonkey Died
That day was a couple of weeks ago, apparently. Webmonkey ceases publication after a final round of layoffs.
The how-to content of the Webmonkey site is what got me rolling in my early efforts at developing web pages in the ’90s. I haven’t used the site as a reference in years but I’m bummed that it’s finally gone kaput.
Google Goes Atom
Google spurns RSS for rising blog format | CNET News.com. I typically don’t pay much attention to the syndication standards wars but this is kind of interesting. Google has gone with the Atom standard instead of RSS for syndication on its Blogger network. Existing Blogger Pro users with RSS feeds can keep them but all other Blogger customers will only be able to deploy Atom feeds.
As long as all the popular newsfeed readers implement Atom, I don’t think it will make much difference to the end users. Anyone maintaining a list of Atom adoption in reader software?
Update: I should have dug a little deeper on the Atom site. Here is a directory of client software (mostly readers) that supports Atom. Thanks, dw!
Yahoo Paid Search Listings
Came across this link on RC3 that translates Yahoo’s new paid search listings: Yahoo Paid Search, Translated. I really don’t like that these paid listings won’t be identified as such in the search results. Ultimately this will hurt them if it degrades confidence in their search results due to not-so-valuable paid listings crowding out other content.
Mono Experiment
Jeffrey McManus, who works for eBay, wrote a command-line utility that fetches the current eBay categories and tells you what has changed since the last time you downloaded it. The reason I’m posting about it here is that Jeffrey is asking folks to test out the C# script on a Mono/Linux platform.
I spoke a little bit about Mono at the M&T conference last month, so for those of you who were at the session, this is an example of how the .NET framework is being ported to other platforms. It may eventually be feasible to run most .NET apps on Linux as easily as on Windows.
Article on Standards-based Design
I just came across this article from last year by Jeffrey Veen on the business value of web standards. Nice summary of the benefits.
ASAE-GWSAE Town Hall Part Deux
View from a Corner Office has another nice synopsis of the second town hall meeting for the GWSAE-ASAE meeting. Events conspired to keep me from attending this one, unfortunately. The post from mystery CEO also provided a link to an information page on the GWSAE site about the merger proposal. (Note to designer: blue links on a blue background – not good.)
From what I heard at the M&T meeting this week I think there is a lot of resistance to the merger within the GWSAE membership. The vote very well may fail if they don’t provide more specifics of what changes will occur due to the merger.
Update: Jeff De Cagna has chimed in on the second meeting as well.
Association Trends Awards
If I can chisel my car out of our third or fourth ice storm of the season (ug!) I’ll be heading down to the Capital Hilton for the Association Trends Awards Program. ASHA’s web site got a bronze award this time in the association web site category, our magazine got a silver, and one our PSA campaigns got the gold!
One of the most exciting awards for our team though was the gold in the foundation web site category. Our content management team worked with ASHA’s foundation staff to redevelop their web site, which was still using the same look created for it in the mid-90s as a donation from Microsoft. Our content team and the foundation staff should be very proud of what they developed together.
C. David Gammel, CAE 